5 takeaways from Christie’s Trump-bashing town hall

Chris Christie announces he’s running for president in 2024

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GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — Chris Christie called Donald Trump “self-consumed” and “self-serving.” He mocked the former president’s voice. And he said unequivocally that his mission is to “take out” Trump.

Over two hours at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, where the Republican former New Jersey governor launched his presidential campaign on Tuesday, Christie cast his candidacy as an almost singular effort to undercut a politician he likened to Voldemort.

Here are five takeaways from Christie’s Trump-bashing campaign kickoff in New Hampshire:

Christie tears into Trump

Teflon Trump will, at a minimum, have to contend with an earful from Christie, who’s positioning himself as the most unbridled verbal decapitator of the former president in the GOP primary.

That’s no small feat in a field where others are just beginning to get into direct confrontations with the 2024 polling leader — and some are still skirting them.

Christie: GOP candidates who tip-toe around Trump ‘don’t deserve’ leadership

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“I am going to be very clear — I’m going out there to take out Donald Trump. But here’s why: I want to win, and I don’t want him to win,” Christie said. “There is one lane to the Republican nomination and he’s in front of it. And if you want to win, you better go right through him because let me guarantee something from knowing him for 22 years. He’s going to try to go through Ron [DeSantis] and Nikki [Haley] and Tim [Scott] and anyone else who stands in his way.”

Christie said previously that he wouldn’t enter the presidential race to be a “paid assassin.” Yet in the first round of his second bout with Trump — after a failed presidential bid in 2016 — Christie skewered the former president as a “self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog” who can’t take responsibility for his actions. Expect to hear that kind of language again next week, when CNN hosts Christie for a town hall.

Other Republicans, including DeSantis, the Florida governor, have begun to trade fire with Trump. But Christie made clear he doesn’t think the rest of the field is up to the challenge, likening their approach to Trump to characters too afraid to say Voldemort’s name in the “Harry Potter” books.

Bludgeoning Trump can benefit Christie in the short term, earning him media attention, giving him sound bites to fundraise off of and possibly boosting him in the polls by appealing to Republicans (and, in New Hampshire, independents) who want to move on from the former president.

But even that has its limits. There’s only so much Christie can say about Trump that voters don’t already know. And there’s only so far Christie appears willing to go. Asked at his town hall whether, if elected, he would pardon Trump if the former president was indicted, Christie wouldn’t directly say.

“I have to tell you the truth, I can’t completely answer that until I know what he was charged with and convicted of,” Christie said. “I’m not going to dodge the answer. But I will tell you as a prosecutor, if I believe someone has gotten a full and fair trial in front of a jury of their peers, and especially someone in public life, who committed those crimes when they held a public trust, I can’t imagine pardoning him.”

But Christie also had some fun with it — saying that “by accepting the pardon, the person must acknowledge their guilt,” so when it comes to Trump, “I’m completely in the clear.”

Introducing imperfection

There’s framing one’s candidacy in the arc of history. And then there’s how Christie opened his town hall — offering a nearly 20-minute lecture on everything from the Greeks to George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln.

In part, it was a lengthy, almost crowd-losing way to set up yet another hit on Trump, this time as one of a cast of “leaders who have shown us over and over again that they are devoid of character.”

‘Character matters’: Christie makes personality pitch for president

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But it was also the beginning of a critical effort by Christie to draw himself into a larger conversation than he currently occupies. Right now, he’s the former New Jersey governor who barely registers in polls and seems to exist solely to hammer Trump.

And voters haven’t forgotten that Christie helped fuel Trump’s rise in the first place. After a dismal sixth-place showing in New Hampshire’s 2016 presidential primary, Christie turned around and endorsed Trump, becoming one of the first major elected officials to back the political outsider. And he stayed by Trump’s side until after the 2020 election.

That loyalty has already led some New Hampshire voters to question his bona fides as a Trump bludgeon.

Christie shrugged that off. “If you are in search of the perfect candidate, it is time to leave. I am not it.”

“I’ve lost. You people did that to me in 2016. And I have two of my children here tonight who remind me of that all the time,” Christie quipped.

“But beware of the leader who won’t admit any of those shortcomings, because you know what the problem is with a leader like that? A leader like that thinks America’s greatness resides in the mirror he’s looking at,” Christie said. “We can’t dismiss the question of character anymore. If we do, we get what we deserve.”

The New Hampshire strategy

When Christie said his 90-year-old father will be knocking on New Hampshire voters’ doors, he probably wasn’t kidding.

Christie might understand the value of retail politicking in New Hampshire more than any other Republican running for president this cycle. He held more than 100 town halls in the state when he ran in 2016. And he launched his 2024 campaign with a roughly 90-minute question-and-answer session on topics that ranged from the debt deal — “governing is about compromise, when did compromise become such a dirty word” — to abortion.

“This is why I didn’t do some big podium speech,” Christie said in a knock on several of his rivals, including Trump and DeSantis, who drew criticism for not taking voters’ questions during his New Hampshire swing last week. “If I want to win this is the best way to do it, to find out what you think.”

Christie plans to run a New Hampshire-focused campaign after finishing a disastrous 10th place in Iowa’s caucuses in 2016, calculating that he can better appeal to more moderate Republicans and independents who can vote in the Granite State’s open primary.

Except that strategy didn’t work so well the last time. Christie bet big on New Hampshire in 2016, holding more town halls there than any other candidate. He won the support of key lawmakers and major conservative-leaning newspapers in the region. He dropped out of the race after finishing a distant sixth in the state’s primary.

Despite being a known quantity in the state, Christie starts this campaign at the back of the pack in polls. He’s trailing not just Trump and DeSantis but also Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence and even South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. To be sure, both surveys were taken before it was clear Christie would again seek the nomination. At 1 percent, he has nowhere to go but up.

Sununu thinks Christie has a shot

Perhaps the most important New Hampshire Republican wasn’t in the room to hear him Tuesday night. But the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, sees a different Christie running this time around.

“I think he’s a lot more relaxed now than he was in 2016,” Sununu said in an interview at the state house hours before Christie’s launch event. “In 2016 he was running for the first time and there was a lot of intensity and it was good. But Chris, he comes off as very genuine, right? He just tells it like it is. There’s something authentic about that that I think will connect really well with folks. He has a bit of a nothing-to-lose type of attitude, which I think is refreshing.”

Sununu’s opinion is important. He’s a popular governor with deep connections in New Hampshire who announced earlier this week that he won’t run for president himself, setting himself up to be a kingmaker in the first-in-the-nation primary.

Christie, he said, already starts with a base of name recognition that other candidates don’t have — something Sununu said could help him to build out his campaign faster.

“An individual like that, who has great name ID already, has the opportunity other candidates don’t to go really deep, if you will, out into really rural parts of New Hampshire,” Sununu said.

Voters, he said, want to see “that you’re going to all 10 counties, you’re earning it door-to-door. That says a lot to a lot of folks. And [Christie] did a lot of that originally. But he can just kind of take it to a whole new level now, given that he has just better name ID and a little more candor.”

Leaning on his record — and contrasting with DeSantis

Christie is the fifth current or former governor to enter the 2024 presidential race. And he’s probably not the last, with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum expected to announce a run on Wednesday (though the mention of him drew shrugs from the crowd in Goffstown).

Some of those candidates, from DeSantis to longshot former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, are banking a lot on the idea that voters are interested in their executive experience, which is at least uncertain at this point in the campaign.

But Christie is making the case, contrasting his experience specifically with DeSantis’, which he suggested came in a Republican echo chamber that won’t translate in a divided Washington. Florida’s Republican-led Legislature set DeSantis up with policy wins to run for president on, Christie said.

“He never had to compromise,” Christie said.

Christie praises debt ceiling deal, takes shot at Trump

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As the Republican governor of a blue state, Christie said he did.

But Christie’s record isn’t unblemished. His eight years leading New Jersey are perhaps best remembered now for the “Bridgegate” scandal that sent his approval rating plummeting to an abysmal 15 percent.

“I also have made mistakes,” he said. “I’ve made judgments that at times were wrong, and I’ve trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted. And it resulted in me being, at one point in my career, admitting that I was publicly embarrassed and humiliated by the things that happened on my watch.”

Then he brought it all back to Trump.

“If your leaders are not willing to admit to you that they’re fallible, that they made mistakes, that they hurt like you, that they believed like you, and that they suffered disappointments and let downs,” he said. “Beware.”

Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.